Being the first person with a telephone must have been very lonely. Waiting
for someone else to get one and call you up and say 'hi, how are you?' And the
unknown: how would you know you're the only person in the world with a telephone?
If you were the second person in the world with a telephone, would you know?
There could be someone else out there thinking they're all alone too, not even
knowing that you're out there to call. You'd be like two castaways on opposite
sides of the same island.
And I don't even want to think about trying to guess that other person's number.
Let's assume the first two phone numbers were 1 and 2. You wouldn't even think
of pressing a number just in case, because as far as you know you're the only
person in the world with a telephone. Maybe there are no numbers. Maybe when
you pick up the receiver it just starts ringing at the other end. How far would
human curiosity go?
Maybe you are the first person in the world with a telephone and when you
first got it rigged up and you picked up the receiver there was no one at the
other end, so now you've given up trying. Maybe you're like Jack with his magic
beans and this thing you brought home brings you so much despair at its uselessness
that you can't even stand looking at it, never mind picking it up. The silence
at the end of the line - it would be too much to bear.
There is only one person who can break this deadlock of isolation: the person
who invents the phonebook. And there really is only one person who is capable
of this task: the guy who sold you both phones in the first place. Of course
the phonebook can start out life as a scrap of paper, a scrawl on a matchbook.
But without him saying 'say, I sold one of these to a guy just this morning,
do want his number?'…well, we don't need to think about what might otherwise
have happened. Let's also not think about the possibility that the first two
phones in the world were sold by different stores. Way too scary.
Alternatively, the first person to have owned a telephone may have been its
inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. The phone is ringing in the home of the second
person in the world to own a telephone: 'Hello Al. Whaddya mean, "how did
I know it was gonna be you?"'.
So now the fate of the telephone rests on the third person to own a telephone,
as quite clearly the second person is quite quickly getting bored: 'Yes Al.
The weather's nice here too, and yes, it is a very clear line. Margaret is just
as well as she was when you asked me last night. Can I go and have my breakfast
now? Look, Maggie's calling, I gotta go.'
So who is it going to be? Is Bell giving them to his friends? Has the telephone
salesman found another customer? What if you don't like them? What if they're
cleverer than you and look down on you? What if Al and the third person gang
up on you and decide to invent prank calls? Maybe you should find someone you
know is on your side and convince them to get a telephone so that you'd be sure
to have someone on your side. And if they got boring too you could find someone
else to get connected.
And thus, the telephone was no longer a symbol of a lone human innovator,
isolated by his technologically advanced ability to communicate longer distances
than man could shout. Quickly it was to become the tool of the 'connected',
a signifier for being in touch with as many people as possible, whether you
had anything to say to them or not. Perhaps you didn't even care to, but it
was there: your arterial telegraph. And nowadays your phone travels with you
in your pocket. No more the anguished rejection fear of the reversed-charges
or collect call. It trots alongside your life like a faithful pet. With your
phone by your side you sit there and dream of all the places you can call….
If only you knew the numbers. Which brings us back to the phone book guy.
A genius amongst sales people, but the workload must have been an albatross
to countless folks from his hopeless family, generation after generation painstakingly
recording everyone's numbers in a doomsday-book-like master copy; the curse
only to be lifted by the development of the silicon chip and the micro-computer.
However, here you are safe in the knowledge that you have your phone, and
your phonebook, and what more could you ask for in life? What more life-affirming
thing could there be than to know you can speak to anyone in the world right
now, and they could be jamming up the switchboards all trying to get in touch
with you? And the dictatorial risk of the manual switchboard operator has thankfully
been averted, furthermore thanks to computers. You have truly climbed from the
shore of your seemingly deserted island and are standing atop the highest peak
with an unbroken view to the entire horizon.
But what is this? Sacré Bleu! The voice of the person you are calling
seems strangely mechanical; they do not respond to your questions; they do not
appear to be listening to you at all. What is that they are saying? 'please
leave a message after the tone'? Someone has invented the Answering Machine.
You are calling from your mountaintop but there is no one around, just the smoke
from a fire recently stomped out. So you leave your message, scraped into the
ashes on the ground.
Once again you are the most isolated person in the world, waiting for that
phone to ring, for that one call to come through. And you sit staring at it,
furiously biting your finger nails, almost imagining the ringing of the silence
in your ears is the sound of the phone itself; the twitching stillness of the
receiver to your unblinking eyes you believe to be the vibrations of it ringing.
And then, in that moment you realise that you are back on that deserted shoreline,
almost as lonesome as you ever were. And you are just a receiver in this power
game, way out on the periphery, insignificant. No one would notice now if you
were disconnected, even if you were the second person to ever get a telephone.
But you can't let that happen, because your phone is on their hook, and you
know that you are least one degree removed from that ultimate isolation of being
cut off. The pet has become a parasite, and the leash was for it to direct you,
not the other way round. So the phone has you, just like it got Bell, and just
like it got the phonebook guy, and his poor, enslaved antecedents.